We Shall Wake's first twenty minutes of gameplay are nearly complete. The tutorial, second floor, and the first encounter with Decem have all been coded.

Along with this, I spent the last week doing major optimization and revision work on the combat engine. Not only have I made the Input systems more responsive, I've also tried to give the combat more weight in general with more hit reactions and flinch animations - along with less floaty knockbacks.

Specifically, I've removed tapping from the combo systems and replaced it with a "press to activate" system. This is more traditional and has proven to be more responsive than what we original had.

For hit reactions, I've added a dynamic flinching system that blends in with enemies current animation. That means if you shoot an enemy while they're walking towards you, their chest will flinch back as they're walking. However, if they're stunned, a more traditional flinch animation will interrupt whatever they were doing. This allows for more hit feedback as to the current condition of your enemy.

I've reduced the slideback from basic hits so that combat will be less slippery, and more stationary. However it's still possible to move across the map at high speeds during combat, as the combat AI has been increased exponentially. In fact, when I first coded Decem, Daniel couldn't tell which MORS was the player (so, technically I passed the turing test! Ha).

We also improved our pathfinding systems to be more robust. It's a 3d pathfinder instead of a 2d one now, so AI react appropriately to ceiling and ledge heights. This solves the old problem of AI jumping into ceilings and jumping up on 30 foot ledges with no strain.

Once I lay the finishing touches on your first encounter with Decem, I'll turn my focus back to the general gameplay and dungeon generation systems. Demo 7 will be released when this is done and we've added in new graphics to hopefully make things a bit more colorful and interesting - and while we're leaking modelers as usual, the other artists are hard at work to make some cool concept work and music. We're lucky and thankful to have them - thank you Ricky, Anthony, Ivan, andRafael!

We've gotten a lot of questions in terms of kickstarters and donation boxes, and we're going to try and work something out that works conveniently for us and you so that you can contribute cheaply without hassle. But we'll come back to this later - if you have any suggestions yourself, feel free to email us. We love to hear feedback from people interested in our game regardless, so even if you want to just say hi, feel free.